


it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be done

by reogulus



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Drug Use, Episode Tag, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02 Finale, Theft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:14:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21763564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reogulus/pseuds/reogulus
Summary: He doesn’t really notice until he’s right next to it, but the area rug under the powder-streaked glass coffee table is littered with tiny objects like bottles of gum, 5 hour energy drinks, lighters, even vacuum sealed bags of pepperettes. Greg is not sure if Kendall has ever had a pepperette in his life.The aftermath from Greg's perspective, starting immediately at the end of the press conference.
Relationships: Greg Hirsch & Kendall Roy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 70





	it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be done

“Get rid of this,” Greg watches as Kendall tosses his phone to Jess. Her fingers flinch ever-so-slightly upon contact; the thing is probably already hot to the touch, a flurry of incoming calls this close to frying the operating system. She pulls a small Ziplock bag from her purse and seals the phone inside; she must carry those bags everywhere, so, points for versatility.

Kendall waves their ride over; the motorcycle has made an official comeback. It makes sense. The roads around this block are more than likely strips of parking lots now. The chaperone nods in their direction and hands Kendall a helmet.

“Call an Uber and take Jess,” Kendall instructs. “She will take you to the vault. Lock up the documents.”

Greg turns to Jess; for about twenty seconds they face each other without making eye contact, and Greg wonders if she wants to ask him the same things he wants to ask her. They have not spoken to each other in person in ages, not since Greg had to ask her for Kendall’s dealer’s digits, after Kendall started making Greg take the first hit on the “park coke” as some kind of food taster for illegal drugs. Now he gets the first hit because Kendall knows he’s starting to like it.

“Th-that was,” Greg breaks the silence, half-heartedly wanting to sound profound. “I wonder how it’s like on the yacht right now. Must be like watching Caesar bleed out on the senate floor.”

Jess looks up from her phone. “The Uber will be here in three minutes. We can’t talk about any of this once we’re in the car.”

“Of course, I know that.”

Jess smiles, “He always said you know more than you let on. I never really believed that until I watched your testimony in congress.”

Greg laughs a little, tries to do it in the leader-like way that the Next Wave handbook says. “Were you—were you actually surprised? What he actually said in there today?”

Jess shrugs. “I get paid to be like an extra limb to him. Does your arm know what goes on in your head?”

*

The last thing Greg did before shutting it off was calling Ewan, after the trip to the vault was over and he split from Jess. He dialed the number in an all genders bathroom to be entirely discreet, before thinking through what he wanted or should say. It wasn’t about the inheritance, it wasn’t _just_ about the inheritance.

“Greg?” his grandpa answered. He hung up, panic flashing through for about three seconds. Then the phone rang again, Ewan calling him back.

“I helped Kendall,” Greg blurted it out, immediately regretting it. Had he forgotten what Ewan did in that boardroom, the last time he was stateside? Ewan might actually chastise him, morally, forever, on top of giving his inheritance away to Greenpeace. He’d be poor _and_ chastised.

“Yes, I figured he couldn’t have done this all by himself,” Ewan sounded cordial enough, “nice of you to let him take full credit.”

“I—I don’t know about that. I mean, I can’t—”

“You haven’t called your mother in two months, Greg. She had to watch you on C-SPAN, for god’s sake.”

“I don’t know what to tell her, grandpa.” Greg sighs, “Did she like the full body massage chair I got her? It’s made in Japan so it must be good.”

A brief silence passed between them. Greg held his breath.

“I told you to paddle your own canoe. Apparently you’ve paddled so well that you’ve taken on a passenger.”

“You mean Kendall?”

“He shot his shot. You think he’ll live?”

“I—I don’t see why not, I think there’s a real chance—“

Greg didn’t finish the sentence. His palm, the hand holding the phone, was getting slick with sweat.

“Do you trust Kendall?”

“I have to, n-now.”

He heard Ewan sigh. He hadn’t heard his grandpa sigh in front of him since his mom was still bankrupt. Then there was a storm of knocking on the bathroom door, a voice shouting which he could not discern whether male or female.

“I gotta go,” Greg stood up from the toilet seat. His heart was starting to race again and he wanted to chuck his phone in the toilet water.

“Bye, Greg. Take a message to Kendall for me, will you?”

*

That same night Kendall takes Greg to a nightclub, the one directly across from the nightclub that Tom took him when he carried a deep fried songbird in his belly. There are too many different types of drugs, all designer, and too many women who want him to snort the powder off their thighs, above their designer boots. Naomi sent some girl to their VIP booth to call Kendall away, and Greg doesn’t know if he will come back.

“You okay? You seem sad.” One of the girls, a brunette, says to him, manicured fingers slightly touching his face. He tries to smile back, but not trying very hard.

“Yeah, it’s been a long day.”

“A clean high can help.”

“Yeah, thanks—I’ve done that,” Greg points to different parts of the table. “And that too. I don’t know—I don’t know if I’ve gotten better at this. You know, less than a year ago, I actually puked after smoking a joint.”

The brunette properly laughs this time. She has a nice, high-pitched laugh to contrast against the booming bass coming from the speakers above. She lays a hand on Greg’s thigh and he takes the hint, nudging closer, knees bumping into the edge of the table. He pretends not to have noticed the pain, leans into her personal space but not quite going for a kiss. She smiles and puckers up, closing the gap between them. She smells like cinnamon, which reminds him, somewhat uncomfortably, of home.

“I think you are doing very well for yourself. Don’t look so angsty.”

Greg laughs, right hand wandering into the pocket of his blazer, getting a grip on his phone again. His cold, shut-off phone. He wants to know where Kendall is, if Kendall is coming back, but he doesn’t want to know how many calls he missed from Tom. So he shifts his hand into another pocket and heads for the back door.

He’s had the habit of escaping a crowded room to smoke and temporarily suppress his social anxiety since high school, but his mom never said anything, not even the time he’d been careless with air freshener and given her a ride with lingering smells of stale smoke in the car. The only time his grandpa might have alluded to it was when Ewan told Greg that Greg’s dad came asking for money because the doctors found a suspicious shadow in his lungs, and Ewan held his gaze just a beat too long before Greg changed the subject.

With his back against the brick wall, smoke fills up his field of vision, and disperses into the night. Greg is still trying not to think about the number of emails and text messages and calls that Tom must have sent him, is still sending him. The most panicked, irrational, useless part of his brain is somehow picturing Tom sitting down with Michelle Pantsil, spilling his guts into her stupid little voice recorder, practically a suicide bomber leaving his final manifesto. A gust of cold wind passes through and Greg’s fingers tremble, just slightly, his index and middle fingers nearly losing balance of the cigarette.

From the periphery of his vision, he sees a woman stepping out of a grey sedan. She turns her head to register his general direction, stops, and calls out: “Greg?”

He recognizes Jess’s voice and feels relieved somehow. Kendall hasn’t forgotten about him. “Yeah, I’m here.” Her heels click against the concrete as she jogs over to him. He tosses the cigarette aside and steps on it, suddenly aware of a numbness rising in his left calf.

“Listen, Kendall wants you to lay low at his guest house tonight. You can’t go back to your place, Tom knows where you live.”

“Jesus, shit, yeah,” Greg can’t believe he’s actually surprised by this—of course he can’t go back, not for tonight, not for many nights, maybe not for all the nights to come. “Do I have time to go pack a bag or—is that totally scorched earth now?”

Jess shakes her head and gestures towards the sedan. “No need, I packed an overnight bag for you. We can send one of our guys to get the rest of your stuff when the headlines die down,” she paused for a millisecond, “for a bit.”

“Fuck,” Greg says, out loud, not realizing he has said it out loud until Jess looks up at him from her phone. “Am I gonna touch base with Kendall again tonight?”

“He’s probably already at the guest house waiting for you. Naomi’s flight took off forty minutes ago,” Jess starts walking towards the door of the club, but stops when Greg follows her. “You get in the car first, I need to pick something up inside.”

“O-okay,” he’s half-turned away from her before he remembers to add a footnote, “the coke was fine. You know, not as mind-blowing top-notch as Coach’s stuff but it was fine.”

Jess shrugs. “It will have to do. The main thing for him tonight is not running out.”

Greg wants to say something clever, but something purely clinical in her face and voice stops him from even trying. He just mumbles, “uh-huh”, before tucking himself into the back of the car.

*

By the time their car rolls into underground parking, the high from the drugs is already kind of wearing off. Greg picks up his overnight bag from the trunk and heads into the building. The elevator takes an unholy amount of time to open to him.

Greg finds the right door in the hallway, knocks on it. Waits three minutes, and knocks again. Jess has taken off in the car after giving Greg what she picked up for Kendall, so if Kendall is not here, he can really think of no suitable place to house himself past midnight in this city, carrying a shit ton of illegal drugs and too much knowledge of much more dangerous things. Even intake for the witness protection program probably doesn’t open until business hours. It’s hard not to spiral into pessimistic, panicky thoughts from here, but Greg tries to keep his hand level as he reaches for the handle, praying for it to be unlocked.

The door opens with a quiet click.

Greg pushes the door out of his way, drops the duffel next to the shoe rack. As his arm flails along the wall, looking for a light switch, the motion sensor is triggered and the whole living room turns bright. Under the huge greenish reddish Frank Thiel print of a concrete cityscape, Kendall is lying on the sectional couch, half a dozen cushions layered between his limbs.

Greg’s stomach drops.

“Kendall?” He calls out, taking a few furtive steps forward. It goes unanswered like his knocks on the door.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Greg curses under his breath, finally takes full strides across the living room. He doesn’t want to _touch_ Kendall because if this is serious, he does not want to leave any hairs or fingerprints, and if not, he doesn’t want to wake Kendall up from a much deserved nap. So Greg bends down to do the smell test instead; no detectable vomit. That’s a good sign.

Greg takes a step back from the couch. He doesn’t really notice until he’s right next to it, but the area rug under the powder-streaked glass coffee table is littered with tiny objects like bottles of gum, 5 hour energy drinks, lighters, even vacuum sealed bags of pepperettes. Greg is not sure if Kendall has ever had a pepperette in his life.

He picks up a packet of the dried meat and pokes it carefully at Kendall’s hand. Kendall’s arm stirs a bit, knocking a cushion lopsided. Sign of life confirmed.

“Kendall?” Greg tries again. This time he hears a low, incoherent mumble, followed by Kendall lifting an arm to cover his eyes with the inner bend of his elbow.

“Jess told me to stay here with you,” Greg doesn’t want to keep watching Kendall sleep so he decides to say something. “I brought the stuff you asked her to buy. From the club.”

“Right, right,” as expected, the mention of drugs prompts Kendall to sit up. “Put it here on the table, let me check it out.”

Greg nods, moves towards the door to get the duffel. He drags his foot forward at just the wrong angle and the pinky toe makes contact with a sharp corner of something from the bodega haul on the area rug. Greg yelps and nearly topples over. “Ow! Fuck!”

Kendall laughs. “Sorry for the mess, man.”

Greg finally gets to the bag, half-heartedly digging through it for the special package. Being stubbed in the toe has somehow made him keenly aware of the fact that he has not eaten anything in the past eight hours.

“I mean, why are these things even here—like—did you go shopping for road trip supplies?”

“Well,” Kendall gets up to his feet, finally, as Greg lays out the drugs on the coffee table. “Naomi said it’s bad for the environment, y’know, to throw batteries in the garbage on the street and leave battery acid to leak into landfill. So I brought everything back and housekeeping can figure out how to sort it properly.”

Truly, there is no way for Greg to piece together how Kendall’s words are meant to be a cogent explanation, so he figured it must be something Kendall and Naomi discussed and agreed upon when they were both high out of their minds.

“Uh-huh, yeah, that’s nice,” Greg picks up the pepperettes as Kendall assumes his usual position, chopping up the powder finely. _He can literally do this when he’s asleep_ , Greg thinks to himself with some kind of wonderment, ripping open the packet and taking a bite.

Kendall is about to bend to the task but stops midway to stare intently at Greg’s chewing mouth. “Jesus, dude, what are you eating? We can order in if you’re hungry.”

In that moment, Greg feels strangely elated and vindicated. Dude just killed his dad in front of the whole world this morning but he has definitely never eaten a pepperette. Some flavours of misery are just born unequal.

*

“Have you talked to Ewan?” Kendall asks when Greg is mid-twirl in his first bite of the Cajun chicken linguine from their Postmates order. Kendall got some kind of fusion calzone that he will not eat until he comes down from the high. He is sprawled on the couch, and Greg tries not to think about being watched as he eats.

“Yeah, before I shut off my phone.”

Kendall is looking at him like he hasn’t expected a positive answer to that question. Greg decides to bite his tongue for the time being.

“He called you?”

“Sure, yeah, he…I don’t know. I think he might be happy about what happened, actually.” Kendall smiles, which Greg misreads as a signal for him to keep talking. “He uh…I think he has a certain regard for you, yeah.”

“You mean he’s _not_ feeling the FOMO of me killing Dad on national television.”

“I don’t think that’s how he would have done it, if he were you,” Greg puts his fork down. “He—he told me to tell you something.”

“And?”

“He said, ‘magnificent effort’. Is that supposed to…mean anything?”

Kendall smiles and, for the first time since they dined with everyone on the yacht, Greg recognizes a kind of sadness in it. The silence between them rings hollow in the vast expanse of the loft. He doesn’t know what’s left to say.

“We were all in Little League back in the day. It’s Dad’s thing. He always said it to the kids who made it past third but fell short of bringing it home. To the other kids, of course, as an in to wine and dine their important parents. Rome and I never heard it from him. Shiv got it only when she played against the boys, then puberty hit and she got fucked too.”

*

The next morning Jess comes to them with coffee and breakfast sandwiches, the lawyers have drafted the affidavits and put together the exhibits for Kendall and Greg to sign, PGM news playing on mute in the background, split screens cutting between Kendall’s congressional testimony and Greg’s.

Greg got the all-clear from counsel over the conference call to reboot his phone. Apparently read receipts are not an issue, and neither is declining calls to voicemail, so long as he does not apologize to or use apology-adjacent language on anyone.

With that, Greg excuses himself from the table, and shuts the guest bedroom door behind him.

His phone starts but doesn’t overheat under his thumb. Greg figures out soon enough that it is because his Waystar email and phone number are wiped and disconnected. The only thing left to check is his personal cloud account, still locked and secured, with the specific enhanced audio recordings saved in the folder named “lifeboats”.

Greg is sure that the only person to whom he feels the urge to say sorry would be his mother, but he has already started making up for it by building a new credit profile for her. _Do you believe in life after debt?_ As far as he’s concerned, it can and will be a clean slate. Better to ask for forgiveness.

There is a question that he’s been turning, over and over, since he was in high school: _how much is the worth of 250 million dollars, really, if you can only get it over a dead man’s body?_ For the first time in nearly ten years, Greg can feel the answer beginning to form at his fingertips.

He locks the phone and puts it away in his pocket. The seat at the table next to Kendall is waiting for him.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been months and I still remember watching the Season 2 finale with that constant feeling of not getting enough air in my lungs. The world needs more #KenstarGregco content and this is my small contribution!


End file.
